Analyst Calls Apple ‘Recession-Proof’

At least one Silicon Valley company is poised to ride out a stormy economic forecast virtually unscathed. In fact, American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu goes so far as to call Apple "recession-proof" in his Thursday client note.

After doing his customary supply-chain checks, Wu says he sees no cause for alarm for the Cupertino, California, company, even in the face of a sputtering U.S. economy and ongoing concerns about falling iPod sales.

While a static economy is already taking its toll on the tech sector, Wu is predicting that Apple will ship 11 million iPhones by the end of 2008, 1 million more than the company’s goal. He’s also tweaking the 38 percent year-over-year growth he predicted in Mac unit sales in January, and now believes growth may be as high as 42 percent. That’s at least partially based on an uptick in Macbook Air sales, he says.

The only slight bump in the road is iPod sales, which Wu believes will fall somewhere in the 9.5-10 million unit range. That’s about a million units below the Street’s 10.8 consensus.

Not surprisingly, Apple’s COO, Tim Cook, recently professed similar confidence in the company’s ability to avoid the repercussions of a stagnant economy:

I’m not saying Apple’s immune to the economy. But if you look at last quarter as an example … last quarter in the U.S., the GDP growth was less than one percent. It was miserable by anybody’s calculation. Apple, in the U.S., grew 27 percent.

For us, we’re focused on what we can control. And what we can control is how much we innovate, what products we do, the experience in our stores, the experience in our channel — all of those things. I think Apple’s success depends on how we do on those things versus whether the GDP is slightly above one (percent) or slightly below zero or whatever.